Creation began on 08-06-23
Creation ended on 12-20-23
Neon Genesis Evangelion
Talismans: Bitterness
SEELE was beyond upset with Gendo and the rest of NERV. They were outright outraged with the discovery that Lilith had been destroyed by two of these demons that had entered their base without even triggering any alarms and exposing her to the public for the second time prior to her destruction. This, in and of itself, had effectively destroyed their goals in every way possible, leaving them with no other recourse than being subject to these demons and their desires to rule over them. However, because this happened under Gendo's supervision, this made him directly responsible for the loss of Lilith.
"…Terminal Dogma was resealed," Gendo informed the Committee during the emergency meeting. "Access to it was heavily restricted."
"And yet, these two demons were able to get in, completely undetected, and made a huge display to the city's general public before reducing Lilith to shreds," said SEELE 04. "This is not only a serious issue, but a problematic concern! The loss of Lilith combined with the loss of Adam makes any attempt at Human Instrumentality impossible to achieve. We are stuck in this evolutionary dead-end."
This reminded Gendo and Fuyutsuki of the aftermath of Second Impact; Adam's self-destruction had resulted in the primary component of his being, the embryonic form that remained of his core essence, couldn't be recovered. While other components had been salvaged and used to artificially engineer the Evangelions, further research into the project, as well as the Human Instrumentality Project, was not possible without the core essence of the First Angel.
"No Adam, no Lilith, no Spear of Longinus," SEELE 01 listed the lack of requirements needed for their grand design that was nullified. "Everything we sacrificed for has been for naught!"
"And all because we entrusted our goals to Ikari," went SEELE 10, "and he couldn't do anything to make his son follow him, and he developed a spine to rebel and abandon his father to his own decisions. You told us before the Third Child had arrived to Tokyo-3 that he would do as he was told, but at every chance available to him, he denied you his obedience…like a beast that refuses to be caged…and when the public rioted for the travel routes leading out the city to be reopened, he bided his time until an opportunity came for him to escape…and he took it after the rioters won and the routes were reopened, allowing him to get away from you and the whole of NERV."
"Even when you tried to reclaim him, he refused you," said SEELE 05. "And he has renounced the name of Ikari in favor of his new name, making it clear that his loyalty to anyone within NERV, let alone your family, is nonexistent. His unruly attitude makes him ill-suited to our purposes; if he can't be manipulated, he is a lost cause. If the Angels are gone, the Evas are useless. And if our goals are impossible to achieve…NERV is no longer useful to us, either."
Gendo was fuming! Ever since his son arrived, they had been met with setback after setback, and the boy refused to cooperate with them! His abandonment of them resulted in these further problems that stemmed from the unknown creature that attacked shortly before he escaped from the city. Of course, Gendo blamed Shinji for all of this because he needed the boy to do as he expected of him…and he wouldn't obey at all, standing up for himself and then abandoning them to their fate.
"He said that what we're dealing wasn't his fate," he remembers Captain Katsuragi telling him in the aftermath of the boy fleeing from the city. "He said that we're crazy to think he would just accept this all as his fate. I'm starting to think that as much as he dared me to shoot him at the train stop, he would've saw a bullet as his one-way ticket to get away from you permanently."
"Cowards are always useless and looking for a way out of a situation where the human race is threatened," he had informed her.
"Not to disagree with you about that, sir, but if this were the case, then as a coward, your son managed to prevail because, as much as I wanted to shoot him at the time, I couldn't risk harming him fatally. And why are we trying to get him to pilot the Eva if he has made it clear that he doesn't want to? It would be simpler to transfer the Second Child here than to entrust our survival to someone that, for all intents and purposes, wants nothing to do with what we do here…and could care less."
Oh, but she didn't know then that Gendo wanted to exploit his son for as long as possible, even at the risk of the human race itself, if it meant getting what he was after. But because nothing went the way they had been expected to, nobody, not him, not SEELE, nobody was getting what they wanted out of this venture. Even if it wasn't entirely Shinji's fault, Gendo still blamed him for his disobedience.
"…We're left with no other recourse but to disband NERV," he heard SEELE 01 announce. "Without Lilith, we cannot achieve what we were after. Within the next seven days, the Geo-Front is to be cleared out and sealed shut. This meeting is adjourned."
All but SEELE 01's holographic monolith disappeared from the room; it was obvious that there was more to be said to Gendo by him.
"Ikari, this is where it ends for you," he told the man. "It is likely that we'll never speak again. We have other concerns to address, such as these…demons."
Then, the last monolith disappeared, leaving Gendo to fume bitterly over the loss of everything.
Shinji, he thought, balding his fists. "Aaaaaaurgh!"
Fuyutsuki, in silence, simply stood and watched as Gendo fumed over the futility of what had become of them now.
-x-
"Hmm?" Shinji went as he ate his lunch in his room under Auntie's shop; he thought for a moment that someone yelled out to him, but he couldn't be sure. "Ehh."
Once he was finished eating, he would astral project again and look around NERV for any new information to gather. But he made it a point now to avoid Unit-01; that last encounter while in his astral form had left him bitter towards both of his parents. The revelation that his mother, Yui Ikari, had been in that monstrosity ever since he was little and had very little memory of her…didn't lift his spirits in the slightest. Not when he saw that other version of himself that was angry towards her, and especially not when he learned that his mother was just another person in an extensive list of people that were willing to hurt others to get whatever they themselves were after. He couldn't put up with people like that…and he couldn't live with people like that, either.
"The thing about our feelings toward other people, Shinji," Auntie had once told him during the time he was learning more about the Sheep Talisman, "is that they're only enduring so long as the people we have them for are around to bother us. If we put them behind us, out of our minds, then the bitterness we feel is brief. Over time, we stop caring about the people that disgust us and move on, doing what we want with our lives because they couldn't do any better with theirs. You can choose a life without the regrets they caused while living with the regret of knowing that they failed you in one way or another. But it's only by choosing to live, to shoulder that weight, knowing that its bitterness will be brief until it's gone…that's when you're free of them. That's when you're free."
And that was something Shinji wanted, to be free from his parents and whatever they were up to. He figured one of the ways to obtain that freedom would be to destroy NERV, along with discrediting them in any other way possible, even if it meant making them a laughingstock or pariahs for the rest of their lives. Since he renounced the Ikari name, he wasn't legally a member of the Ikari family, just an outcast with an insignificant blood tie that no longer mattered to him; it felt more like his father was the one that shamed the family name, and he was just going to make sure it no longer had any value left to anyone that followed it. With the last of his ramen cleaned up from his bowl, he laid down on his futon and placed his left hand on the Sheep Talisman, activating its power to project his astral form.
Let's go see what else we can gather from NERV, he thought as he flew towards Tokyo-3, noticing that there were people gathering up to leave. What do we have here?
"…So, that's it?" He hears a woman say to a man as they were packing their car up. "You and everyone else at NERV get sacked because of that giant that got ripped to pieces?"
"That's the case," the man states. "Whatever the reason it was there, the majority of NERV had no idea until after that creature showed up and attacked. And then the base gets attacked a second time, only by these two demons, which rip it to pieces and declare their aim to rule us all. I don't know why, but I think the people behind NERV were mixed up in some business that was just as bad as whatever that giant was that got destroyed. Let's just get out of here and figure out what to do next. NERV is history, anyway."
Shinji flew into the Geo-Front and saw more people leaving en masse, indicating that NERV had been disbanded, forcing the personnel to gather their personal effects and leave in an orderly fashion. He saw men cleaning out their lockers, women discarding their personnel uniforms, even the massive computer being shut down by the faux-blond woman he discovered was in an affair with his father.
"We should've had the boy brainwashed when he arrived," he heard Ritsuko mutter.
Boo, he responded as he flew towards his father's office. Don't hate the guy that wanted nothing to do with this agency. Besides, you're the one that started banging the bastard. How much did you really even deserve your position here? Did you even earn the position…or did you have to sleep your way to get it?
Entering his father's office, he saw Gendo sitting at his desk, fuming over what had become of NERV after the Demon Sorcerers arrived and he himself had left.
"One way or another, Shinji," he heard him say, "I will make you pay for this."
Even when I'm not the one at fault, you still choose to hold me responsible for your irresponsible and pathetic shortcomings. I'm not the deviant here, old man. I'm not the one with delusions of grandeur and a desire for absolute power and control. If you can't handle the fact that I am not going to submit to the likes of you or whoever it is that you answer to or lie your twisted heart to, that's on you. You and Mother. That's on you.
He hung around his father's office for a little while, but after an hour of seeing the man do nothing, other than fume over his losses, he vacated the room and looked around to see if there was anything else to either worry about or inform the others on that NERV probably shouldn't have had to begin with. If there was one thing to be learned about a potential adversary after suffering a great defeat, it was that they usually always kept something to serve as a backup to their goals for later on in the future, like an insurance policy or rainy-day fund, whatever it was.
The only thing I can think of that would be of some interest or value to whoever funds NERV is…this, he expressed as he floated in front of Unit-01, unwilling to reenter it after learning that his mother was inside it. But this is only one Eva. This is the test-type, meaning it was designed for test runs and what have you. Whatever happened to the prototype, the original?
Passing through walls and noticing a room with some degree of damage that hadn't been repaired, bathed in orange and red light, he found what he was likely looking for, seeing an Evangelion half-submerged in some sort of liquid, one of its arms lodged into the side of a wall with a large device shaped like a crucifix sticking out of its back. What made it stand out to Shinji was its head. In place of a face or mask, nothing but a large, cybernetic eye could be seen. In addition to the eye, Shinji found no signs of any armor or armament adorning the behemoth, a clear indication that this was the original Evangelion that he heard of: Evangelion Unit-00. With only his imagination to give some sense of what happened here, Shinji guesstimated that during a procedure to get the Eva to function to the liking of its would-be masters, it went crazy and tried to escape from the chamber, endangering the personnel before being shut down, but not before endangering the life of the person inside the Entry Plug that was likely ejected from its back.
Since Unit-01 has the soul of my mother inside it, he assumed, it has to be the same for this one. Someone's soul is inside it. But whose soul dwells within here?
He flew into the Eva and found himself in a setting identical to the one that was the command center of Central Dogma. In front of him was a little girl that was laying on the floor, her pale skin and blue hair marking her as an albino, but her face was identical to that of his mother's.
"Don't bother with her," he hears a woman's voice as he lowered down to his knees to check if she was alive. "She's only here to haunt me."
Looking over to his left, just over the railing leading down to the supercomputer structure, he sees a woman laying on one of the structures, surrounded by a small pool of blood.
"I take it that you're the one who's condemned to this place?" He asks her, floating down to meet her, and wondering to himself where he had seen her before because she seemed familiar to himself. "Who are you?"
"Who are you?" She asks back, looking at him through her right eye.
"Ladies first, please."
Whoever this woman was, Shinji wasn't going to be a gentleman by giving her his name first before she gave him hers.
"Naoko Akagi," she finally expressed.
"Naoko Akagi? Are you, by any chance, related to Ritsuko Akagi?"
"You've met my daughter?"
"More or less than professionally?"
Raising her head up, the mangled woman looked at him and thought that she had seen him from somewhere before.
"Are you…Shinji Ikari?" She asks him.
"No," he answers. "I'm Shinji Omamori."
"Omamori? My apologies. You look like someone I used to know."
"Whoever they are or were, they're probably nothing more than despicable trash not worth anyone's time."
"You sound like you hate them."
"More or less than personally?"
"Are you by any chance acquainted with Gendo Ikari?"
"Only enough to know I want nothing to do with him."
"Well, he has a son. Had a son? He'd likely be around your age."
"He had a son…until he no longer had a son."
"That makes no sense."
"He had a son. Past tense, meaning he doesn't have one now…and never will again…unless, of course, some senseless woman decided to get with him and have his children. May the kami have pity on those poor souls."
"Well, he was Shinji Ikari, a little happy boy."
"Define 'happy'."
"He had an innocent smile."
"Innocence implies uncorrupted, not exposed to the awful horrors of human behavior or the emotional trauma people of the worst sort can inflict upon each other with malicious intent to bring others to their level of rottenness."
"Did you know his son?"
There was a silence between them for a brief moment…until Shinji responded with, "He wasn't the happy little boy he might've been when I met him. Life went south for him…until he decided to leave the world he came to dislike behind. He didn't die…but he didn't want to live with the fact that his family, if that's even what you could call those people he was left with after his parents up and ditched him, was nothing more than a sham, a falsehood. When opportunity came to him, he took it and left that life behind. For a time, I was saddened by his departure, but I am grateful that I met him. Life mattered to him, just not the one he had with those people that hurt him, either physically, verbally…or emotionally. I know he's better off now. He severed his ties with the Ikaris…and had no intention of going back to them, leaving his past and forging his future without them."
Naoko was considered a genius by some, but it was only because of a simple mind that she was able to put two and two together with this young man. The way he explained things to her, she could deduce that, despite his insistence of such, he was the son of Gendo and Yui Ikari, alive and well, just not the happy child they had left.
"So, what brings you here?" She asks him.
"NERV is getting shut down," he reveals to her. "Before I left again, I just wanted to make sure that there was nothing here they could use like a weapon against the people that want nothing to do with them."
"Knowledge is power."
"But when knowledge leads to something that can be used to harm others, that becomes the power that is most dangerous. Knowledge isn't true power, but a tool exploited to obtain that which is considered a form of power."
"Knowledge led to the creation of the Evas, a form of power."
"A form of power that is no different from a handgun being brandished by a kid that finds it in their parents' bedroom. Or worse, something that's like a drug being used on someone that doesn't even need it or knows what it's comprised of, later resulting in side-effects like addition or degeneration."
"People will always be seeking that which offers them their desires."
"People with negative wants and desires will often seek means that lead to negative outcomes."
"Hold on, NERV? Not GEHIRN?"
"That's right. NERV is, from what I learned recently, GEHIRN restructured."
"Well, GEHIRN was tasked with the creation of the Evangelions."
"I don't know much about what GEHIRN did before it became NERV, but NERV is the one with the Evangelions, and NERV's the one getting shutdown."
"And this doesn't bother you in the slightest?"
"The only thing that bothers me…is the messed-up things that people in organizations like NERV…or GEHIRN…or SEELE, even…demonstrate a cold and despicable willingness to commit in order to get whatever it is that they want, knowing that innocent lives will be affected in the process. I will not support groups like that."
"So, what will you do, then?"
"I have a job…and I'm doing it right now."
"Oh? And what is your job that you're…doing?"
"Gathering intel to return to my boss in order to use later against an adversary that may be the strongest one ever."
"Is that so?"
"Yes, and if you're not here against your will, I would recommend that you get out of here and find yourself a new residence."
"I can't get out of this Eva…and I'm here against my will."
"How'd you get in the Eva to start with?"
"It's a long and depressing story."
Shinji sat down beside her and crossed his legs.
"Whenever you're ready to share your past," he tells her, and she rises to a sitting position, revealing the left side of her head was smashed up. "I'm pretty sure that you can change the way you appear here."
Naoko then made herself look less hideous and more presentable.
"Better?" She asks him.
"Much," he answers.
"I guess it all started after I completed building the MAGI, a trio of supercomputers meant to aid GEHIRN and Tokyo-3 when it was completed above ground."
To be continued…
A/N: Yeah, SEELE's council members were upset with Gendo for the loss of Lilith, Gendo was upset with Shinji, blaming him for everything wrong that happened with the destruction of his precious scenario, and Shinji himself was upset with his parents and meets a woman who's upset with where she is. Until the next chapter, and Merry Christmas to you all.